Microplastics are tiny plastic particles from textiles and other sources that have broken down into smaller and smaller pieces until they are less than five millimeters in length. They have been found all over the world, from sediments in the deep ocean to Arctic snow. Scientists have found that microplastics are being released though natural […]
By Theresa Crimmins Across much of the U.S., a warming climate has advanced the arrival of spring. This year is no exception. In parts of the Southeast, spring has arrived weeks earlier than normal and may turn out to be the warmest spring on record. Apple blossoms in March and an earlier start to picnic […]
By Dana Drugmand Opponents of a regional proposal to curb transportation sector emissions in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic are using a number of deceptive tactics to attack and criticize the Transportation and Climate Initiative. Groups tied to the oil industry have pointed to misleading studies, deployed questionable public opinion polling and circulated an open letter […]
Some backcountry skiers and snowboarders are not just hitting the slopes. They’re measuring how deep the snow is and sending the data to climate scientists. Listen here: “We gave them GPS and of course they all had avalanche probes in their backpacks,” Wolken says. “And we said, ‘OK, go out and sample as much as […]
By Dr. Brian R. Shmaefsky One year after the Flint Water Crisis I was invited to participate in a water rights session at a conference hosted by the US Human Rights Network in Austin, Texas in 2015. The reason I was at the conference was to promote efforts by the American Association for the Advancement […]
Britain has been battered by back-to-back major storms in consecutive weekends, which flooded streets, submerged rail lines, and canceled flights. The most recent storm, Dennis, forced a group of young climate activists to cancel their first ever national conference, as CBS News reported. “There’s a bleak irony in our being beaten back by climate change,” […]
The Greenland ice sheet is melting faster than ever recorded in modern history. New research finds that the world’s second-largest ice deposit is not just melting from the surface but from below as well, which adds a new twist to consider when predicting global sea level rise. The Arctic ice sheet stores large quantities of […]
The world’s oceans are moving faster, and researchers think it might be another sign of the climate crisis. A new paper, published in Science Advances Wednesday, found that 76 percent of the top 2,000 meters of the ocean appears to have sped up since the 1990s, largely because of wind speeds. And the ocean’s speedup […]
Current estimates of carbon emissions from melting Arctic permafrost rely on a model of a gradual melt. New research has found abrupt thawing of permafrost which means carbon emissions estimates should be doubled. The rate at which permafrost is thawing in the Arctic is gouging holes in the landscape, according to a new study published […]